


Child of the Century

by Miss_M



Category: Deutschland 83
Genre: Character Study, Cold War, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Relationship(s), Spies & Secret Agents, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-06 02:52:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 7,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8731999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: “A great moment has found a little people.”





	1. ‘From the ruins risen newly’

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blueteak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueteak/gifts).



> Since canon is iffy on the characters’ ages, I assumed the characters would have been the same age in 1983 that their actors were when the show was made in 2014. So Schweppenstette was born in 1927, making him 56 in 1983. Lenora and Ingrid were born in 1934 and 1937, respectively. Martin is implied to be 24 in the first episode, but in episode 7 Schweppenstette talks about meeting Ingrid only after the Berlin Wall was built (August 1961), so I fudged the dates a bit.
> 
> I included information about the relevant historical events in chapter end notes – these are not essential to read the fic, but if anyone is curious to know more, I hope they fill in the gaps. Any mistakes are mine. I own nothing.

_1945_

Whenever he thought about how every life was shaped by historical forces, Walter Schweppenstette recalled that, had he been born a few months earlier, the Wehrmacht would have taken him as soon as he turned eighteen.

Instead, he was conscripted by the Volkssturm, where he learned his very first words of Russian. A retired baker from Potsdam turned corporal in Walter’s unit had been taken prisoner by the Russians in the previous war, and took the initiative to teach the lads under his command a few useful phrases: “Don’t shoot, I surrender.” “Please, may I have a piece of bread?” “I need a medic for an injured comrade.”

Later on, Walter took classes and worked hard on his Russian, but those first words never left him. He recited them silently in his head, again and again, while he watched the old baker’s face turn purple and black as his oxygen was cut off. When their lieutenant caught wind of the unauthorized language instruction, he informed the Gestapo, who hanged the baker in front of the whole unit. The Führer had forbidden surrender and defeatism in word or deed, on pain of death. 

They could have tightened the noose so it broke the old man’s neck, but they had wanted him to suffer as he suffocated. They had wanted the boys in the unit to watch. 

_Don’t shoot I surrender, don’t shoot I surrender, don’t shoot I surrender…_

Walter had lacked a clear political or historical consciousness before then, but after that day he knew: youth was no excuse for passivity or ignorance, and the Russians might kill and destroy or they might save them all. 

Often he tried to explain this to his mother, after he was released from the prisoner-of-war camp and came home. He’d been lucky, they could have sent him to Siberia or to the uranium mines in Saxony. Because he’d been in the Volkssturm, not the Army or the SS, and was a scrawny lad, short for his age, they’d kept him just long enough to teach him the rudiments of Russian and instill in him gratitude for the hand of friendship the peoples of the Soviet Union extended to the defeated German nation. 

“You go,” the camp commander had told Walter in broken German on the day of Walter’s release. “Be good. Make something of you.” 

Walter had nodded, as though giving a solemn promise. 

His mother didn’t want to hear it. She avoided eye contact with the two Russian soldiers billeted in the Schweppenstette apartment. Walter had seen enough and heard enough whispered stories to guess why his mother flinched if her hand brushed a Russian hand while passing bread or salt across the dinner table. But Alexandr Alexandrovich and Tikhon Dmitrovich were good men and kind, kinder than they might have been to a German woman whose husband had joined the Nazi Party in 1935 – so at least he wasn’t an Old Fighter, just an amoral opportunist – and been killed fighting the Americans in France, and her son the former Hitler Youth member and Volkssturm veteran. 

When the occupation authorities evicted the mother and son and informed them they would have to move into a single room in a shared apartment, with an outhouse and a water pump in the yard and no central heating, Tikhon Dmitrovich and Alexandr Alexandrovich helped them load what furniture would fit into their new home onto a handcart, which Walter then pulled down the streets, alongside endless rows of bombed-out buildings. Walter understood they were fortunate and privileged to be given even the one room, and in Berlin, no less! They wouldn’t have to worry about finding a place to live in the countryside. 

Walter’s mother remained deaf and dumb in the face of his willful optimism. 

Walter decided fairly quickly that nothing he might say or do would console his mother, so he stopped trying. Her sorrow was a polyhedron, it had many facets and sources, and it was too much for her only son to carry. And he was hungry for everything: for food, for respect, for warmth, human or that derived from a plentiful coal supply, he wasn’t choosy. He worked on his Russian and his English, joined a Communist youth organization at the first opportunity, told anyone in a position of authority who’d listen than his parents were Nazis, true, but he rejected them and was committed to the cause. 

He turned his face to the future, which had to be better than the past, otherwise what was the point of any of it? Walter was eighteen. He could not accept pointlessness as a real, historical possibility.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical notes:** Chapter title is from the East German national anthem, “Auferstanden aus Ruinen,” written in 1949. 
> 
> ‘Old Fighters’ (Alte Kämpfer) was the term for people who had joined the Nazi Party before the Nazis took power in 1933. 
> 
> The Volkssturm was a citizens’ militia created by the Nazi regime in 1944-1945 to defend the territory of the German Reich from invasion by Allied forces. Its members were mostly men too young or too old for regular military service. 
> 
> Adolf Hitler did forbid Germans to surrender or retreat before the ‘racially inferior’ enemy coming out of the East. As a result, some people who engaged in ‘defeatist’ talk or displayed the white flag were summarily executed by military, police, or government officials in the last days of the Third Reich’s existence. 
> 
> The Soviet Army in East Germany (including Berlin) committed numerous acts of rape against German women during the invasion in spring 1945 as well the occupation period (1945-1949). Until summer 1947, Soviet soldiers were routinely billeted in German homes – the ones not destroyed in the wartime bombings and fighting, which had caused many Germans to be internally displaced. Between 600,000 and 1.2 million German POWs deported to the USSR after the war remain unaccounted for.
> 
> The uranium mines in Saxony and Thuringia were vital to the Soviet atomic program, so they remained under Soviet control even after the East German state nationalized other industries after 1949.


	2. The Basis of Socialist Order

_1952-1955_

Walter was older than most of the students in his doctoral course in German literature at Humboldt University. They were the children of families with the right class background or people who had been persecuted by the Nazis for the right reasons: communism, not race or other political beliefs. Walter had had to fight hard for a place at university, let alone admission to an advanced course. He had written numerous petitions, waited in front of many offices, said ‘please’ to many apparatchiks of variable intelligence. He had joined the Party as soon as he could. He had made top marks on his entrance exam. 

Kerstin had had it easy, by comparison. Her family were peasants and had been expelled from the East in the winter of ‘45, which must have been a painful experience, Walter would allow that much. But after that, all doors had opened to Kerstin. Despite ten years in boarding schools and at the university in the capital, she still spoke with a broad Posen accent. After three to five glasses of schnapps or vodka, she bragged about coming from a long line of peasants on both her mother’s and her father’s side, and called herself unironically ‘good proletarian stock.’ After six to eight glasses, she crooned the songs she’d learned in the League of German Girls in an off-key alto or she reminisced about a camping trip in summer 1944, which her girls’ group had gone on with boys from the Hitler Youth, under minimal adult supervision. 

She was a child, Walter thought. An overgrown, healthy, heedless brat. She exasperated him, and he envied her the ease with which she moved through life, unfettered and unburdened. 

Within two years, they became lovers, got married, and lost an unborn child to an infection which would have been treatable with Western medication. The medication was not readily available to anyone except Party bigwigs, and Walter could not afford to order it through a pharmacy in West Berlin. It would have cost him most of the modest living stipend he received from Humboldt, and as a citizen of East Germany Kerstin was not entitled to medical care in the West unless she moved there permanently, which she refused to do. 

Six months after Kerstin’s miscarriage, Walter’s mother was shut up in a sanatorium at the state’s discretion, for her own good and the good of the people. Tuberculosis carried her off anyway.

After that, Kerstin and Walter lived in the same tiny student apartment, ate and wrote their essays on Heine and Schiller at the same table, slept in the same bed, but the only one to consider them married was the state. To each other, they were strangers. 

Walter suspected he’d let down the camp commander who’d told him to make something of himself: all Walter had to show for himself was a Party membership and an education in preparation for socially useful work. He shared the former privilege with many others, and every citizen of the German Democratic Republic was entitled to the latter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical notes:** The League of German Girls was the female equivalent to the Hitler Youth. Members of the two often participated in co-ed activities, including camping and holiday trips, where promiscuity between ‘racially healthy’ young Germans was not-so-tacitly encouraged. Hence the acronym BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädel) was facetiously said to stand for Bund Deutscher Matratzen – the League of German Mattresses.
> 
> Posen is the German name of the Polish city of Poznan, which was annexed by the Third Reich during World War II. 
> 
> Some 10-12 million Germans – members of German ethnic minorities long settled in East Europe or people resettled to the occupied East by the Nazis during World War II – fled before the Red Army advance in 1944-1945 or were violently expelled from postwar Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary in 1944-1948, exacerbating the housing shortage in Germany. 
> 
> Until the late 1950s, the East German state could shut up people suspected of suffering from tuberculosis or being a carrier in sanatoria against their will, if they refused treatment. TB was an especially grave problem in the Soviet Occupation Zone/East Germany, in part because of the bad living conditions at war’s end, in part because many people fleeing the Soviet advance or trying to escape from the Soviet Bloc until 1961 passed through there on their way West. 
> 
> Humboldt University, founded in 1811, was within the Soviet Zone in Berlin and became quickly coopted by the communist regime. This prompted the creation of the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin) in the city’s Western zones in 1948, many of its first professors having left or been dismissed from Humboldt as politically unsuitable. 
> 
> East German universities, especially in the 1940s and 1950s, explicitly favored the children of communists, peasants, and workers for admission, as part of remaking society along socialist lines – and lessening the influence of the aristocratic and upper-middle classes on the education system. Boarding schools were for students at secondary schools who lived far enough away from school, especially in small towns and villages, that daily commuting was not an option.
> 
> Until the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, East Germans could visit West Berlin and vice-versa, although socializing with Westerns was seen as more suspicious by the GDR regime than shopping trips to better-stocked stores in the West.


	3. ‘Heathrose fair and tender’

_1961_

In January 1961, Walter took over the survey of German literature in the modern period from a colleague who’d gone on maternity leave earlier than expected. He walked into a drafty lecture hall at the Karl Liebknecht College of Education, prepared to begin the lecture sequence on Goethe, only to notice a beautiful blonde girl sitting in the front row.

Such a sight was not unusual in and of itself: a perk and a sorrow of the job was the inexhaustible stream of pretty young women one could admire across the distance from the lectern to the hard wooden desks and benches in the auditorium.

This young woman seemed to know when Walter’s eyes, roving the staggered rows of students while he lectured, paused on her head, bowed over her notebook. Every time he glanced her way she would look up from her notes, as though challenging Walter to look away first. 

When she came to see Walter in his office at the university and started talking earnestly about Goethe, Walter kept thinking he should shield his eyes with his hand, for the sun had come out, only he was not blinded. She was even lovelier up close, animated with talking about writers dead these 200 years, flushed with youth.

Walter kept two cartons of cigarettes in his desk: Juwel, bought at home, and a Western brand bought in West Berlin, Kent or Marlboro, if he could get them. He smoked Juwel while he marked student essays or wrote lectures, one after another, until the ashtray began to overflow. He saved the good kind for special occasions and important visitors. 

Looking back, it amused him to notice in his younger self the first stirrings of the intelligence operative’s habitual propensity for manipulation, of others as well as himself. He offered Ms. Ingrid Rauch an open packet of Kents, lit her cigarette for her, observed how long her eyelashes were when she leaned close to the match. 

She sat more comfortably as she leaned back and inhaled. “Oh,” she sighed, a flicker of pleasure, watching the burning tip of her cigarette, while Walter watched her. “I can never afford these. You are very kind to share.” 

She brought the cigarette to her rouged lips and looked Walter in the eye with the same directness as during lecture or their discussion about literature. She did not smile, but even so there was something soft in her expression. Something approachable. 

Walter’s courtship of Kerstin had relied more on alcohol and Kerstin’s garrulous good nature than any skill at seduction Walter might have possessed. Now, sitting in his office with this bright flame of a woman, he realized it was a two-step, back and forth, little sallies and retreating lures. They both knew where the dance would lead and took the time to enjoy dancing it well. 

He allowed himself to smile and lean his elbow on his desk, leaving the open packet of Kents lying suggestively on the desk between them. “Tell me about yourself, Comrade Rauch. Is your family happy with your choice of university course?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical notes:** Chapter title is from the Goethe poem “Heidenröslein,” which Yvonne Edel sings at her parents’ party in episode 1.
> 
> There was no University of Potsdam until 1991, when it was created by merging several GDR-era institutions of higher learning, including the Karl Liebknecht College of Education, named after one of the founders of the Communist Party of Germany.


	4. Walls

_May 1962_

“We two need nothing further from you,” Ingrid told him from her bed at the maternity ward, pale and inviolate as a marble statue. 

She could not prevent Walter from seeing the baby or speaking to the nurses, but even so Walter could no more reach Ingrid than he could take a train to Kazakhstan and volunteer for the next space flight out of Baikonur. 

Outside the window of the hospital room intended for four women but shared by six, a chaffinch trilled in a linden tree to attract a mate, mocking the human dramas of birth and life unspooling inside the building.

_October 1962_

Summoned to his superior’s office, Walter found the old man in the company of a woman in her late 20s, dressed daringly in slacks and a patterned blouse, her hair a mass of thick dark curls. 

“Schweppenstette, this is Lenora Rauch. She will be working under you on Operation Swallowtail.” 

As a firm adherent to historical materialism, Walter did not allow himself to believe in fate. But as he shook Lenora Rauch’s cool, dry hand, he reflected that the German Democratic Republic could be a very small place. 

“That is a nice blouse, Comrade Rauch,” Walter said. “Imported?” 

Her eyebrows arched. He’d caught her off guard, but she could play the game. No conversation was casual or inconsequential in their world.

“You’ve caught me out, Comrade,” Lenora Rauch said. “The pattern is from _Burda_ , but my sister made it for me.” 

“Your sister is a seamstress?” 

“A teacher with a skilled pair of hands.” 

“Ah, interesting.” As though he hadn’t known this. Walter wondered whether this whole scene was deliberate, whether his secret was out and this woman had been placed to spy on him specifically, rather than in the general way everyone in their country was expected to look out for and watch over everyone else. 

“This is fascinating,” the old man broke in, “but perhaps this insightful discussion of our society’s infiltration by Western fashions can continue elsewhere?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical notes:** The fashion magazine _Burda_ began appearing in West Germany in 1949. Every issue, starting in 1952, contained sewing patterns. Copies, even years-old ones, were prized in the Soviet Bloc, since the clothes available in state-owned stores in the East tended to be of poor quality, and even standard sizes were not always available.


	5. Cold Comforts

_1963-1976_

After Ingrid, there were others. Walter no longer cared to make any woman stay with him, and they obliged by leaving him in due course, one by one.

Marianne was one of Walter’s first informants, after he decided on the career change which drove a wedge between he and Ingrid ( _Ingrid’s expression when he’d told her his news, as though a door had just slammed in Walter’s face; only later did it occur to him that when he’d said he had news, Ingrid had expected him to say he’d left Kerstin for good_ ). Marianne reported on her boss at a chemical factory. For years she’d carried on an affair with the man, only to have him go off and marry the daughter of a Party functionary. 

“The other secretaries think I don’t notice them laughing at me behind my back, but I’m a hard worker, Comrade Schweppenstette. He’s the one who’s sleeping his way up the ladder,” Marianne told Walter with a blunt laugh during one of their early meetings. Yet when Walter patted her hand in sympathy and offered her another cup of coffee and a jam biscuit, as per the guidelines on handling women informants, she blushed like a young girl. 

She was older than Walter and grateful for the attention. Quickly he learned his lesson about sleeping with informants: those situations got messy fast and ruined good working relationships. 

After Marianne, there was Lena, who worked the afternoon shift at the milk bar on the street where Walter was assigned an apartment following his divorce from Kerstin. Lena attended a polytechnic in the morning, worked in the afternoon, and thought sleeping with a Stasi lieutenant would help her secure a place at university despite her middling grades.

Being with Lena reminded Walter of Ingrid a bit, though Lena was frivolous where Ingrid had been serious and dedicated, all too aware that she had had to wait a few years to obtain a place at university due to her bourgeois background, and so hadn’t graduated till she was 25. Anyway, unlike Lena, Ingrid hadn’t needed help from a man to forge a way for herself. 

And after Lena, there was Lyudmila Ivanovna, a member of General Ivanovski’s staff, who met Walter during a joint briefing by Soviet military intelligence and the HVA. She went to live with her parents in Kiev when she got pregnant. She never wrote, maybe she’d had an abortion for all Walter knew, though he doubted it. Lyudmila would have kept and raised the child out of sheer spite. She was like that, stubborn and quick to anger, which was what had attracted them to each other: Walter had mistaken her fiery temper for a passionate nature, and Lyudmila had seen his ingrained unflappability as a superficial reserve to be broken down. Neither had filled the hole in the other’s life with what they were, not even what they had imagined the other could be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical notes:** The HVA was the foreign-intelligence branch of the East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi), for which Schweppenstette and Lenora work in canon.
> 
> The Stasi was the biggest employer in the GDR. 1.5% of the entire population of 16.5 million people worked for it. In addition, between the Stasi’s creation in 1950 and the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as many as 500,000 GDR citizens worked as ‘unofficial collaborators’ i.e. informants. The Stasi had indeed worked out detailed guidelines for informant-handler interactions, which included making the informant feel comfortable and appreciated, meeting with them in clean, well-furnished apartments, and offering especially the women something sweet to eat.
> 
> Army General Yevgeny Ivanovski was commander-in-chief of Soviet forces permanently stationed in East Germany between 1972 and 1980.


	6. Like a Hare

_1966_

After her and Lenora’s parents died, Ingrid got to keep the family home with the kitchen garden and the woodshed. Lenora took care of it, or so Walter assumed. He knew he hadn’t made it his business to secure Ingrid’s living arrangements, so Lenora must have been the one.

They never discussed Ingrid. Lenora acted like she didn’t know Walter knew her sister, and Walter pretended not to care for the existence of Lenora’s sister with the soft hands skilled at sewing. They both suspected the other knew how much they each knew. These convolutions were normal in their world. 

As for the boy… Sometimes Lenora mentioned him: the doting aunt, one of her many masks. Walter acted disinterested. Other people’s children were nothing to him, except insofar as all of the state’s children were his business. 

Yet sometimes he couldn’t resist, though he despised his own weakness. Maybe leaving Kerstin had contributed to his susceptible state, for he had few illusions about himself. He knew it unlikely that he would ever marry again, ever father another child. 

A fine April day, blustery and cold, with those blue Brandenburg skies that stretched on and on, farther than any ocean, any steppe. Walter was walking down Ingrid’s street, twenty meters behind Ingrid and the boy, whose little hand was tucked safely in his mother’s hand. Under his free arm Martin carried a cheap rubber ball, as big around as his head. He was blond like his mother and looked small for his age, as Walter himself looked in childhood photographs. Martin was telling his mother something, Walter was too far away to pick out words, all he heard was the lad’s fluting tone while Ingrid bent her blonde, curly head to listen more intently.

Ingrid and Martin went into the bakery on the corner. Walter drew closer, only six meters away from the door, and leaned against a birch tree, which was just starting to put out its first green buds. He lit a cigarette and watched the bakery door. They would come out, Ingrid carrying a bag of rolls for their dinner, and walk on to Martin’s kindergarten. Then Ingrid would continue on to work. 

The rubber ball flew out the bakery door, bounced down the three concrete steps, and kept bouncing down the sidewalk, straight toward Walter. A moment later, the boy came charging out after his toy, followed by Ingrid’s cry of “Martin, stay here!”

Walter experienced a moment of pure panic. This was why he did not work in the field: he hated having to improvise. He looked around. The nearest doors belonged to private homes and were shut, the nearest car behind which he might duck was five meters behind him. And what if someone saw him dive for cover behind a car, decided he was trying to steal it, and called the police? Walter wasn’t supposed to be here, he wasn’t assigned to follow his former lover and her child, he couldn’t simply tell the concerned citizen or the policemen to go away because a Stasi officer outranked them all. Having to explain all this would embarrass him, personally as well as professionally.

The ball hit Walter’s shin and bounced back toward the running boy. For lack of a better option, Walter rounded the thin birch tree and leaned his back against it, so he was facing away from the bakery and the boy. He was in no way hidden. He could no longer hear the ball hitting the pavement.

“Hello. What are you doing?”

Walter did not turn around, though the sudden desire to do so hit him like a blow to the stomach. Every novice agent knew one was not supposed to speak to the subject under surveillance. He began to sweat as he kept his eyes on the street’s distant vanishing point and ignored the boy, who inched closer to stare up into Walter’s face, the ball held securely in the boy’s thin arms.

“Are you playing a game?” Martin asked his father. 

Had Walter had a sense of humor about life’s absurdities, he would have laughed then. But he didn’t.

“Mart… Martin! Come here right this instant!” 

Ingrid’s voice, frightened when she emerged from the bakery, turned instantly hard when she recognized Walter, even from behind and wearing his new coat. 

Martin dawdled, his legs turning to carry him back, in obedience to his mother, but his face still turned up to Walter, curious about this funny stranger hiding behind a tree like a spooked hare.

“Don’t make me come get you!”

With a tiny sigh, the boy left at last. Walter did not move, did not look away from the vanishing point, until he’d counted to 200 and could be certain Ingrid would neither confront him nor wait and see what he did next. His cigarette burned his fingers at 128. He dropped it on the ground and kept counting till he was certain he was alone in the street. 

Before he returned to the office, he entered the bakery, bought a couple of rolls, and told the baker to forget he’d seen or heard anything. The man understood at once, tried not to charge him for the rolls, but Walter ignored the weak refusal and left exact change on the counter.

That night, he ate the rolls with pickled herring and fresh onions. They tasted the same as all other rolls Walter had had in his life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical notes:** This chapter was inspired by (and the chapter title lifted from) Claudia Rusch’s memoir of growing up in a family with dissident ties and having the ‘company’ of Stasi agents as a regular part of her childhood.


	7. Lenin and Laika

_1969_

Rahela Zimmermann was 26, from Prenzlauer Berg, born on the Adriatic coast to a Yugoslavian mother and a Jewish father from Leipzig, who had left Germany in 1938, fought with the communist resistance in Yugoslavia, and come home a hero after the war. All this was in her file. 

A war child, as they were all children of the war, in their ways. 

For a child of such resilient parents, she looked very nervous, sitting with Walter in her classroom after the children had gone home. Her knuckles were white as she squeezed her hands in her lap. Her pinafore dress had a pattern of tiny flowers and looked like something one of her first-grade students might wear. She may have been thinking about her fiancé’s record for petty thievery and vandalism, the two years he’d spent in prison when he was 19. She may have been wondering what she should request in return for answering Walter’s questions. 

“You live with your parents and your fiancé.” Not a question: this was in her file too. 

She started a little and nodded, a sharp jerk of her chin, up and down. 

“In two rooms with only cold running water. You have applied for another apartment, but…” Walter trailed off in anticipation of her leaping in to fill the silence. 

She did not disappoint. “They said we’ll have to wait, that we may go up the list a bit if we were married, but that too costs money. A friend of mine applied seven years ago, and she’s still waiting, and she has two children!”

She broke off, bit her lip, as though realizing she perhaps should not have mentioned her friend to Walter.

Walter did not care about her friend, though he would request to see the files cross-referenced with Ms. Zimmermann’s. No harm in being thorough. 

“We can look into this for you,” Walter said, using the ‘we’ to deter her pestering him for details. “Now.” 

He extended an expectant hand. 

Ms. Zimmermann placed several sheets of paper in his hand. The top sheet contained a dictation written in a seven-year-old’s scrawl, the G’s and Q’s nearly identical, the capital letters straining upward like elephants’ trunks. The grade in red ink was a 2. 

Next was a homework assignment, a German composition titled “How I improved my homeland this summer.” The handwriting was marginally neater.

Finally, there were two drawings done in crayon. The first showed Lenin leading the revolution. The perspective was all askew, and the world apparently had been changed by Lenin and only three other Bolsheviks, but the colors were vivid and the likeness of Lenin quite good. 

On the bottom of the pile was another drawing of Lenin. The leader of the Bolshevik Revolution stood in a perspectiveless landscape of the kind favored by children and decadent artists: a slash of green for grass, two flowers, a cloud half-covering the yellow sun. By Lenin’s feet stood a dog with black ears and a black snout, and something like a parachutist’s harness across its ribcage. 

Walter looked up at Martin’s teacher. “He drew Laika next to Comrade Lenin?”

Again Ms. Zimmermann looked nervous, like Walter might blame her for Martin’s wild flights of the imagination. “We read a book about space last week. Martin was sad because Laika had to go up into space all alone.”

 _Or because she had to die there all alone_ , Walter thought. Perhaps in the boy’s mind the dead revolutionary and the dead dog deserved to coexist in some happy, areligious afterlife. Or perhaps he had been pestering Ingrid for a dog. 

Walter considered Martin’s written assignments and the drawings together. The boy had intelligence and sensitivity, though he might apply himself to his work with greater diligence. Still, Walter imagined he would need to do very little to secure Martin a place in a good secondary school and then university. 

The picture of Lenin and Laika in a field of flowers was still in his hand. 

“You may keep that, if you like,” Ms. Zimmermann said shyly. “I’ll tell Martin I lost it…”

“You should not lie to your pupils,” Walter interrupted. He tapped all four sheets of paper into a neat pile on his knee and returned them to Ms. Zimmermann. 

A good life was better than anything else Walter might offer his son. Fairytales were no use preparing a child for life. Anyway, Walter told himself, he did not miss reading to his child. Not at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical notes:** Grades in East German schools ranged from 1 to 5, with 1 being ‘excellent’ and 5 ‘unsatisfactory.’
> 
> Laika was the first animal to orbit the Earth. In 1957, the Soviets launched her into space inside Sputnik 2 as part of the preparations to launch a human cosmonaut. She died a few hours after takeoff – the plan was always for her to die in orbit. Most animals the Soviets sent into space after Laika were in spacecraft designed to return to Earth, and survived the trip.


	8. A Friend

_1977-1984_

For years after his divorce, Walter had lived in a succession of apartments assigned to him by his employer, each slightly better than the last one, commensurate with Walter climbing the ranks, yet none quite what one would call a good place to live. Finally, with the construction of the new apartment blocks in Marzahn, Walter got a place at which not even the decadent West would turn up its nose: on the fourth floor, two rooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, big windows, lots of natural light, his and adjacent buildings surrounded by trees. The commute was longer, but worth it. 

Walter’s building was the middle section of a U shape formed by three apartment blocks. The empty space behind and between the buildings served as a yard of sorts, where children played football and women stopped to gossip on their way home from work. 

Coming home from work one day, Walter noticed a knot of women and children gathered around a wooden crate resting on the ground. They were laughing and making idiotic noises, which suggested the crate contained a baby or an animal of some kind. 

One of the women noticed Walter watching and nudged another woman, discreetly enough not to seem rude, clearly enough that Walter would notice. He made a mental note to look into the first woman while the other one bent to speak to her young son in an urgent whisper. The boy reached into the crate, then came running up to Walter with something held fast in his little hands. 

A kitten: blue eyes, striped fur, ears which looked huge on its tiny skull. 

“Please, Comrade Schweppenstette,” the boy recited the words imparted by his mother. “My mother said you might like one. There are five, they all need homes.”

Walter started to say no, what a preposterous idea. He knew the boy and his mother, knew the father was in prison for helping a friend try to escape West. Did these people think they could buy Walter’s influence and good will with a kitten?

He bent at the waist and cupped his hands for the boy to place the kitten into. It was warm and weighed no more than a snowball. “Is it male or female?”

The boy looked stricken. “I… I don’t know…”

Walter shook his head: never mind. The kitten squirmed, tried to right itself in Walter’s cupped palms, failed, and made a thin noise of protest. 

“Tell your mother to hurry up and find homes for the others. They can’t be running wild out here, they might go rabid.” He did not say thank you: the kittens did not belong to the boy’s mother. 

She listened to her son impart Walter’s message, then offered Walter a nervous smile across the yard: the smile of the resentful, helpless yet not devoid of hope. 

Walter took the squirming ball of fur and ears to his apartment, where it slept on an old blanket folded at the foot of Walter’s bed. The kitten Walter named Anna grew into a sleek, tabby beauty. She would await Walter’s return from the office just inside the apartment door, ready to trip him up and meow her protest at having been left alone all day. 

The boy’s father served out his full sentence. 

When Anna caught a cold and died, Walter replaced her at once, though he had to ask around for anyone who had kittens ready to wean: a brief weakness he did not enjoy, as he imagined his colleagues laughing at him and his neighbors looking for hidden, sinister meaning behind his queries whether they knew anyone who owned a cat with kittens. 

His second kitten was grey and long-haired. Walter told himself one cat was just like another, but it took him a long time to name the new kitten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical notes:** In 1977, the East Berlin borough of Marzahn became the locus of a major construction project: the government built apartment blocks out of cheap prefabricated concrete slabs (Plattenbau) in order to finally resolve the enduring housing shortage and the poor condition of much privately-owned housing (since the state did not own it, it was allowed to decay). As the showpiece for the project, the apartments in Marzahn were given especially to young families and state employees. By 1990, over half of all East Germans lived in Plattenbau blocks built across the country.


	9. East Germany in Autumn

_November 1983_

After Operation RYAN blew up in Walter’s face, Fuchs couldn’t wait even a week before he called Walter into his, Walter’s, old office, where Fuchs now sat alone behind Walter’s old desk. A better agent would have let Walter stew, but Fuchs was always too nervous to wait. 

He demoted Walter, who had expected as much. Still, he had to give Fuchs props for a modicum of imagination: he reassigned Walter to the Division of Garbage Analysis as punishment. 

“I considered reassigning you to teach new hires the basics of interrogation and working with informants, but then I remembered that old saying, ‘Nature comes before teaching’,” Fuchs said, too much of a cold fish even to gloat properly. “So I asked myself: where does your natural talent lie? Then it came to me: you can look for your precious Worcestershire sauce and purloined uranium in the garbage thrown out of diplomats’ and scientists’ homes, _Colonel_ Schweppenstette.” 

_November 1989_

The demonstrations and protests had been growing in size for months, yet all Walter saw were malcontents of the kind who plagued any new society. The rhetoric of peace, freedom, and disarmament had cost him enough. He had sifted through garbage for a few years until he’d earned his pension. Now he was an old man who lived alone with his cat. He refused to make any of this his business.

The morning of November 10, he woke up with a headache, because he’d drunk a bit too much the previous night, which had made him fall asleep early. The news was everywhere, vibrating in the air like crickets at high summer, seemingly carried on the wind: the Wall was open. People had gone through. The border guards had let them.

The Wall was open. 

Watching events unfold on TV, listening to the pervasive excitement in the courtyard of his building, in the shops, on the train, all Walter could think of was what that Wall had meant to him – safety from foreign attack, security for his country, a direction for his life to take – and a line from Schiller, which went round and round inside his head: “A great moment has found a little people.” 

Every time history challenged the Germans to the greatness they claimed was theirs, they failed. Every single time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical notes:** The Friedrich Schiller quote refers to Schiller’s disappointment when the French Revolution, instead of ushering in the true Age of Enlightenment and setting an example for other countries, descended into the Reign of Terror.
> 
> The Stasi’s Division of Garbage Analysis was real and in charge of analyzing trash for traces of suspicious foreign foods or chemical, industrial, and other materials. Given that Ostpolitik and détente had made it easier for East Germans to get Western goods, this meant a lot of sifting through people’s imported coffee grounds and the like.


	10. Deutschland 90

_September 1990_

Walter no longer got headaches from drinking in the evenings. Instead, he woke in a haze, which dissipated after his second or third cup of coffee, especially if he added a little schnapps to the cup. 

The knock on his apartment door cut through the haze but did not dispel it. Walter had only just woken up to find he’d fallen asleep on the sofa again, and Max was using his stomach as a pillow. 

He displaced the complaining cat and shuffled upright, wondering who it could be. It was too early for the postman, and Walter was not expecting a package or anything bigger than the electricity bill. He hoped it wasn’t some local hooligan who’d decided to cure boredom by ringing the old Stasi man’s doorbell till it broke. They’d broken the building’s intercom long ago, and the Stasi was no longer a name to instill fear and respect.

“Yes, yes,” Walter shouted over the knocking as he pulled on a sweater over his crumpled shirt and found his slippers. “A moment!”

He rooted in his sweater pocket for a handkerchief he knew should be there, but it wasn’t. Irritated at having no handkerchief, Walter looked through the spyhole. The lights in the hallway had been broken weeks earlier and never replaced. Not too long ago, that wouldn’t have been allowed to stand. Walter made out only a man’s silhouette standing outside his door. 

He unlocked the door, took the security chain off. The thin grey light coming down his hallway from the kitchen and the living room proved sufficient: Walter would have recognized his son in any light.

Martin looked older, a bit broader. A man rather than still half a boy. He wore a dark blue jacket without a logo, over a clean shirt and jeans. Walter approved of the jacket – people seemed so eager to serve as walking advertisements for Western corporations – but the jeans made him frown. They had used to be objects of desire and envy, like all items imported or smuggled in. Once anyone could have them, they revealed themselves as what they had always been: simply vulgar.

“Good morning,” Martin said, snapping Walter out of his reverie. “I should have called, I know, but you are not in the phone book.”

“I had the phone disconnected months ago. No one worthwhile called.” Walter’s mouth was dry. He needed his coffee. “What do you want?”

Perhaps he could have attempted to sound a trifle less harsh, but he saw no purpose to Martin visiting him. The last time they’d seen each other had been in Stasi HQ that day in November 1983. 

“I figured it out.” Martin’s eyes were downcast. He told his tale to the threshold, standing still on the other side of Walter’s door. “After I saw you at the funeral and you left without speaking to me, I got curious and went through Mama’s papers. There was a photograph of you two on holiday on Rügen. Also her proof of exams passed, with your signature. She’d written ‘August ‘61’ on the back of the photograph. I was born in May ‘62. She almost didn’t graduate because I cried so much she couldn’t sleep or study, she used to tell me that when I complained about having to do homework.” 

Martin’s rambling fell silent. Walter wondered whether Martin had shared his findings with Annett, who apparently had not told Martin about the time Walter had had lunch with her and Ingrid and reminisced about his and Ingrid’s past. Maybe he should have sent Ms. Schneider to infiltrate the Bundeswehr – she was a natural secret-keeper, in her way. 

“I congratulate you on your investigative efforts. And now, what is it that you want from me, Martin?” 

He bit back that it was too late in both their lives for a game of football on the sidewalk or a trip to the Kulturpark. Sarcasm would alienate, and Walter was curious in spite of himself. 

Martin looked up at last. He had Ingrid’s eyes. Walter remembered with a jolt how much that had thrown him when Lenora had brought him to Ingrid’s house and Martin had held out his hand to shake Walter’s. 

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Martin said, that seeming guilelessness which had served him well while he had served his country. “Just to talk, I suppose… May I come in?” 

Walter considered refusing and shutting the door in Martin’s face. The possibility was oddly sweet, like a piece of Turkish delight.

He stepped back just enough for Martin to cross the threshold. It didn’t occur to him to ask to take Martin’s jacket till Martin was already in the living room, stock still just inside the door. Walter approached, looked over Martin’s shoulder: Martin and Max were staring at each other across the living room. The cat lashed its tail slowly.

“Sit down,” Walter said. “I’ll make coffee.” Going through the motions of hospitality, but his head was starting to ache and his vision to blur. 

Once he was in the kitchen, had a pot of water on the stove and the coffee jar open under his nose, inhaling the rich scent – before, when Lenora had used to bring it from the West, this had been the good coffee; now it was just coffee – Walter felt fortified enough to speak and not worry that his voice would wobble. 

“Are you going to leave soon?” With reunification looming, they both knew Martin was likely to lose his position in the New People’s Army. “Everyone seems to be leaving. Like they can’t wait to escape their own country.” That last touch of bitterness had a sweetness of its own. 

“I don’t think so,” Martin replied from the living room. Walter heard him open a window. “I’ve been West, I’m not sure there’s anything for me there. Annett is seeing her new boss, some guy from Hamburg, she wants to move there, but I told her she can’t just take Julia without my permission. She isn’t very happy with me right now.”

Walter poured boiling water into the coffee pot: an old one, like all his things, he hadn’t rushed to throw out perfectly serviceable East German furniture only to replace it with cheap plyboard from IKEA. 

“She is strong-willed and used to getting her way.” Walter lifted the tray with the coffee service and carried it into the living room, taking small steps: his hands shook a little. “Your mother was the same.”

Martin looked up at Walter’s remark about Ingrid. He took a deep breath, opened his mouth, hesitated. Walter was not surprised when Martin did not say whatever had been on the tip of his tongue.

“Sometimes I think it’s crazy, all these people between you and me, connecting us, and yet…” Martin gestured, about to rise and take the tray, but Walter nodded for him to stay seated. Martin kept talking while Walter poured the coffee. “When I’m walking down the street or I take Julia to the park, if someone calls out ‘Moritz,’ I turn my head to see who it is. Who’s calling to me. All this time, I still turn my head at that name.” 

Walter wished he could offer something meaningful in reply, but he couldn’t: he’d never worked in the field. He sat on the sofa with the cat, lit a cigarette, and busied himself with the ritual of the sugar bowl and the milk jug.

Martin was sitting in Walter’s favorite armchair. Also the one Max liked to claim when Walter wasn’t home, which wasn’t as often as it had used to be. 

Max sat on the sofa armrest and stared at Martin, unblinking. Martin stared back with a wary expression. 

Walter glanced from cat to boy and back again. “He’s waging psychological war on you,” he said with a discreet nod at Max, like the cat might take umbrage at having his plans revealed. “Once he’s worn you down and you drop your guard, he’ll come over and sit on your lap.” 

Martin smiled: light conversation was useful in putting the subject at ease. “He might not like the outcome. I’m allergic.” 

“I know.” Walter held out a cup on its saucer. “I don’t have any biscuits.” 

“That’s fine. How did you… Oh right, my reports.” 

Walter smoked and stirred his coffee slowly, so his spoon would not scrape loudly and nervously against the ceramic. “They were very detailed. You did a perfectly adequate job, given your lack of training.” 

“I don’t think so,” Martin said slowly, shifting in the armchair. His cup rattled against its saucer. The thought of having been a good spy made the lad uncomfortable. 

“Yes.” Walter used the very useful word _doch_ , which brooked no argument or excuse. “You have a good eye and memory for detail, and you understand people. How to talk to them, how to give them what they think they want, so they will give you what you need.” 

He did not know why he was telling Martin this, he felt no particular desire to flatter the lad. Yet all he had said was the plain truth. The specter of Martin bursting in, that day in 1983, insisting Walter was wrong in front of everyone, lingered between them like cigarette smoke. 

Walter ground out his cigarette with at least a centimeter of tobacco left above the filter.

“No,” Martin said firmly. “I wasn’t a very good spy. I got caught calling home on my first night over there. I dropped… all kinds of stuff…” 

“Beginner’s mistakes.” Walter could not hold back a critical remark, an experienced professional to a junior. “Though calling from an unsecured line _was_ incredibly irresponsible of you.” 

Martin’s eyebrows shot up. “Does it matter now?” He pretended to banter, but he was visibly relieved to be let off the hook, so he could think of himself as just a bad spy, not someone to whom lying and subterfuge came naturally. 

Walter rested his coffee cup on his knee so he could scratch Max’s ears. The cat’s eyes became slits as he butted his head against Walter’s palm. From the very first days with Anna, Walter had admired the autonomy of cats: creatures which gave affection when they wanted to, not when their owner required it of them. 

“No,” he conceded Martin’s point. “I suppose none of it matters. None of _us_ matter. You, you’ll adapt, become a capitalist. Me, it’s too late for me. I wouldn’t do it even if I could.” 

“Isn’t there anything you’d like to do, which you couldn’t do before?” 

Walter considered not answering. But then, because nobody had visited this apartment even before the Wall came down, and he had never before sat talking with his son over coffee, he gave a one-word answer, which meant everything to him and nothing to Martin: “Wetzlar.” 

Martin smiled: that guileless face. “Young Werther.”

Walter was so shocked he nearly dropped his coffee. His mind and his face had never been an open book for just anyone to read. “Yes,” he said. “You like literature?”

“Mother insisted I do well in all my subjects. She thought it unacceptable for a teacher’s son to get anything less than all 1s.” 

Again Ingrid’s specter seemed to dam up the flow of words between them. Martin could be strong-armed into serving his country with the promise of a kidney transplant for his mother, but the German Democratic Republic could not force Ingrid’s body to accept the organ permanently.

Rather than speak about Ingrid, Walter pointed out a flaw in her educational plan for Martin. “You never learned to play the piano.” 

The look Martin gave him was borderline fresh. “No, but I learned chess and two languages, and I got a commendation for knowledge of Marxism-Leninism in eighth grade.” 

“Bravo.” Walter meant it sincerely, wondered whether he merely sounded bitter again. After a brief silence, he licked his lips and said: “Yes, Wetzlar. Before the Wall was built, I always intended to go, but I never got around to it. Other things were more important than indulging myself.” 

Martin looked out the window at the grey sky. “It can’t be more than a few hours by train. It’s not even ‘over there’ any more.” 

Walter drew a breath, held it until his heart began to drum. “Perhaps… Perhaps we could go. Together. You could come with me.” 

Martin looked his father in the eye and returned his empty coffee cup to the tray.

“Perhaps.” He stood up so suddenly Walter felt compelled to do the same, though he could not move as quickly as Martin. “First I think we should go for a walk, take in some air, maybe buy some oranges.”

He said _Apfelsinen_ , either an old habit or humoring an old man. Walter opted for the former, decided to take it in the good humor in which it seemed intended. 

“The stores are full of oranges now, that ruins it for me. I remember getting one orange for Christmas after the war, then it was special.” 

“Lenora used to bring me oranges for my birthday,” Martin offered. 

Walter allowed himself to smile. “She always had an eye for the fine things, your aunt did. Does she write to you?” 

“She calls. I asked her if she’s planning to visit, she said there’s nothing she wants in the new Germany that she can’t get in South Africa, and probably a heapful of trouble she doesn’t need if she did come back.” Before Walter could say anything bitter again, Martin slapped his palms against his thighs briskly. “Anyway, I want an orange now, special or no, and I want to stretch my legs in the park, and you could use some fresh air. No offense, but it stinks of cat piss in here.”

“The park,” Walter muttered, to the ceiling, the sky, and the cat washing itself on the sofa. “He wants to go to the park. With the addicts, and the punks, and the homeless. We didn’t have any of those before, and yet they insist on calling this progress.” 

Martin shook his head, smiling, while Walter fetched his coat and hat. Playing the part of the cranky old man came too easily, but he did not mind much. 

While Martin rinsed out the coffee cups and Walter looked for his keys, Walter allowed himself a small, unspoken hope: that one day Martin might even speak the word Walter would not admit he wanted to hear Martin call him. He’d never say as much, not even were he on his deathbed. He’d hide that desire and keep it special. He was good at that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Historical notes:** The Kultupark Plänterwald Berlin (known after 1989 as the Spreepark) was an amusement park in East Berlin, which opened in 1969. It closed down due to insolvency in 2002. 
> 
> Rügen Island in the Baltic Sea was a popular holiday destination in the German Democratic Republic. 
> 
> The New People’s Army was dissolved after reunification, with only a fraction of its former officers absorbed – with a demotion in rank – into the Bundeswehr. Most officers and soldiers were let go and entitled, at best, to only a tiny pension. 
> 
> In the year following the opening of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, East Germany experienced enormous economic and social upheaval as its uncompetitive, state-regulated economy was downsized, often under the supervision of new managers and bosses from West Germany. Many East Germans moved West in search of better wages and a higher standard of living, to the point where in parts of the GDR in 1990 basic public services could not be provided since so many people had left. Those who stayed often did not cope well with high unemployment rates, the rapid breakdown of social and ideological norms they’d taken for granted, the influx of non-German immigrants, and rising crime and addiction rates, as well as the creation of the ‘besser Wessi’ (‘better West German’ or ‘the Westerners know everything best’) syndrome, as West Germans tended to adopt a condescending attitude toward the failing East German state and its people.
> 
> Former Stasi agents were entitled to their pensions, and few were subject to criminal investigations after 1989, since the Stasi had been a perfectly legitimate organization in the GDR. Putting the GDR on trial according to West German law and ethical norms would have opened up too many cans of worms for a speedy transition from communism to capitalist democracy. 
> 
> Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote _The Sorrows of Young Werther_ while working as a lawyer in Wetzlar in 1774. The novel’s publication made Goethe a literary superstar. He spent most of the rest of his life in Weimar, the city with which he is chiefly associated, and which East Germany promoted as a major tourist attraction, while the less famous Wetzlar lay in West Germany.
> 
> East and West Germany were reunified on October 3, 1990.


End file.
